American Law and Economics Review V2 N1 2000 (107-125)
© 2000 American Law and Economics Association
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Congress and the political expansion of the U.S. districts courts
1 Sloan School of Management E52-545, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 50 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA 02142-1347, USA
2 Auburn University
3 University of Texas, Austin, TX, USA
z Corresponding author
Fax: (617) 253 2660
E-mail: jdefig@mit.edu
Abstract
Expanding the number of U.S. district judgeships is often justified as a response to expanding caseloads. Increasing judgeships during unified government, however, allows Congress and the President to engage in political (patronage and ideological) control of the federal district courts. This paper examines empirically the relative importance of caseload pressure and political motives for Congress to expand the number of federal district judgeships. We demonstrate that politics dominates the timing of judgeship expansion in the U.S. District Courts. We also show that both politics and caseload affect the actual size of those timed expansions. In particular, we find that before 1970, Congress seemed to have strong political motivations for the size of an expansion. After 1970, Congress became much more attentive to caseload considerations.
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